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Sunday, May 26, 2013

DIY Tips & Tricks: how to use a jewel light in your guitar pedal project

Jewel lights are generally used in amplifiers but with few easy modifications they can also be used in guitar effects. Here's how I added a jewel light on my Box of Rock Clone.

I bought my jewel lights from Ebay and they came equipped with a light bulb. They sell different versions with different voltage requirements, but I didn't pay much attention to those details since I was going to replace the light bulb with a standard 5mm LED.

Step 1: This jewel light model can be dismantled into three parts. The base (socket for the bulb) of the jewel light is pretty tall and it just doesn't fit on a regular guitar pedal enclosure. So, the black socket and the light bulb are not needed.

Step 2: Below are the parts required. If you're going to mount the bigger "ring part" of the jewel light (shown on the left) outside the enclosure, then obviously you're going to need the nut supplied with it. But in this case just the lens of the jewel light is going to be outside the pedal and the "ring part" itself is going to work as a nut securing the lens in place.

Step 3: Mount the 5mm led bezel inside the lens with hot glue or contact adhesive (= contact glue). Nut of the 5mm bezel is going to hold it in place and prevent the bezel from falling inside the lens. You can set the height of the LED by adjusting the nut of the 5mm bezel.

Step 4: As I said in step 2, the jewel light can be mounted to the enclosure with two different ways. You can leave the bigger ring part of the lens (shown on the right) outside the enclosure OR put it inside the enclosure and use it as a nut to secure the jewel light in place. Latter method requires a smaller diameter hole in the enclosure. But be careful and drill a hole that is exactly the right size. This method doesn't leave much room for error since the rugged edge on the lens that holds it in place is just slightly larger on diameter than the required mounting hole.